This new trial between the two high-tech innovators and Open Science proponents presents an important step forward to making research publications not only easier to find and access, but also more inviting to fellow scientists seeking new collaborations and platforms for voicing their ideas and expertise.

Currently, there are 168 and 948 article records fed to ScienceOpen straight from RIO and Check List respectively.

While the articles’ underlying data, such as author names, citations, keywords, journals and more, are automatically harvested and analyzed by ScienceOpen, so that research items can be easily interlinked, readers are encouraged to further provide context to the research items. The user-friendly intuitive interface invites them to add their comments, recommendations or open post-publication peer reviews, and even create their own topical collections regardless of affiliations and journals.

To make sure users land on the most relevant articles in what feels like the blink of an eye compared to traditional methods, ScienceOpen also accommodates an advanced multi-layer search engine relying on a total of 20 smart filters and six sorting parameters.

“We have long worked closely with ScienceOpen, as it only makes sense given our shared vision for the future of academia, so the present trial project happened very naturally,” says Prof. Lyubomir Penev, founder and CEO of ARPHA and its developer – scholarly publisher and technology provider Pensoft. “Nowadays, we are well aware that scientific findings are of little merit if ‘living’ in a vacuum. Therefore, we need research articles to be as discoverable as possible, and, no less importantly, to be open to feedback and further work.”

“We are thrilled to add this new content to the ScienceOpen as we have both strong researcher communities in zoology and in scholarly communications within our broadly interdisciplinary content. The ARPHA platform is a natural fit to deliver rich metadata to our discovery services and we are very much looking forward to working with their team,” says Stephanie Dawson, CEO of ScienceOpen.

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About ScienceOpen:

ScienceOpen is an independent start-up company based in Berlin and Boston, which explores new ways to open up information for the scholarly community. It provides a freely accessible search and discovery platform that puts research in context. Smart filters, topical collections and expert input from the academic community help users to find the most relevant articles in their field and beyond.

The first to take advantage of the service is the most recent addition to the journal platform’s portfolio — Russian Journal of Economics

Following the recent integration between ARPHA and the collaborative project RePEc (Research Papers in Economics), journals publishing in economics will have their articles indexed in RePEc decentralised bibliographic database upon moving to the technologically advanced platform.

Working with 50,000 registered authors from around the globe, having indexed about 2.3 million research publications from 2,800 journals, and serving over 80,000 email subscriptions on a weekly basis, RePEc’s services are set to further increase the discoverability and creditability of economics papers published in any ARPHA-hosted journal.

“Having added yet another web-service integration to the list, ARPHA once more demonstrates its flexibility and customer-oriented approach when it comes to providing a new home for journals looking to step up and provide all those innovative and high-tech features to their users,” says ARPHA’s and Pensoft’s founder and CEO Prof. Lyubomir Penev. “In times where the findability of a research publication is almost as important as its quality, I am certain that our integration with RePEc will significantly benefit our clients specialising in economics.”

Speaking in Novosibirsk, Russia, the founder of RePEc, Thomas Krichel noted, “When I set out what would become RePEc in the early 1990, my vision was of a non-proprietary system that all could contribute to, and that all could use freely. My particular concern was to level the playing field between publishers. Open access content is particularly valuable. I am pleased that ARPHA has chosen that publishing avenue.”

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Additional information:

About RePEc:

RePEc (Research Papers in Economics) is a collaborative effort of hundreds of volunteers in 96 countries to enhance the dissemination of research in economics and related sciences.

The heart of the project is a decentralised bibliographic database of working papers, journal articles, books, books chapters and software components, all maintained by volunteers. The collected data are then used in various services that provide the collected metadata to users or enhance it.

So far, over 1,900 archives from 96 countries have contributed about 2.3 million research pieces from 2,800 journals and 4,500 working paper series. About 50,000 authors have registered and 75,000 email subscriptions are served every week.

RePEc grew out of the NetEc project founded by Thomas Krichel in 1993.

Citation count per individual publication is only a part of the useful and comprehensive data freely available for any articles published in a journal hosted on the ARPHA Platform, thanks to a new integration of the recently launched Dimensions badges.

The badges, which provide a citation count and further context on when and where an item was cited, further enhance the familiar citation insights already available from ARPHA. These include a current list of all papers referencing a particular article straight from major databases Crossref, Google Scholar, Scopus and PubMed Central.

To provide an additional in-depth insight into a paper’s impact, while placing it into a relevant context, Dimensions searches through over 90 million publications, and 873 million citations indexed in its own massive database. Going beyond the conventional research article, the tool also provides links to related grants, clinical trials, patents and policy documents.

A single click on the Metrics tab within the menu of any article in an ARPHA-published journal reveals the new eye-catching Dimensions badge, where it appears beneath the popular colourful “donut” of Altmetric – another research analytics innovation developed by Digital Science.

At a glance, the visitor can see the total and recent (from the last two calendar years) count of citations, in addition to the Field Citation Ratio and Relative Citation Ratio – designed to help users see how the article compares in a given field.

In a useful information page, the Dimensions team explains what these values stand for. For example, an article with a Citation Ratio of 0.8 has a count of citations considered as average for its subject area. The 1.2 is the watershed, beyond which a publication is deemed highly cited. Once at the 5-point mark, the number of citations is to be read as extremely high.

A second click on the badge brings up the Dimensions Details Page, where the reader can find a new set of citation data, including an interlinked list of the publications that have cited the paper, as well as their distribution over time and across research categories.

“There is no doubt that citation count and real-time, real-life impact within both the scientific community and the public space are essential for any scientist,” said ARPHA’s founder and CEO Prof. Lyubomir Penev. “In this sense, analytical and user-friendly tools, such as Dimensions and Altmetric, come to bridge a crucial gap – one which could easily make-or-break a researcher’s career and image in academia.”

“I am pleased to ensure that any author who has ever published with our journals can easily and openly track and demonstrate the actual performance of their work,” he added.

Christian Herzog, who led the Dimensions project at Digital Science, said “The Dimensions badges were developed to aid the research community in assessing and contextualizing publications. We’re happy to partner with ARPHA and contribute additional value to their platform.”

In a new integration, the publishing platform ARPHA teams up with nonprofit, open-source annotation technology provider Hypothesis to further enable academic discussion and foster collaboration in the spirit of open science practices.

This partnership makes Pensoft the second publisher to implement this technology across its whole journal portfolio.

Upon opening an article published in any ARPHA journal, website visitors can now spot a dialog-box icon in the top-right of the screen showing the number of submitted annotations, which he/she can reply to at the click of a button. Annotations appear highlighted within the webpage whenever a user is logged into their account on Hypothesis.

Alternatively, the user can simply select some text and add a note to share his/her own idea, feedback, opinion or question inspired by the publication. Thus, the content of the research paper becomes alive, while readers could contribute to the study’s discourse.

“I am delighted to see ARPHA partnering with Hypothesis not only because this benefits our users and journals, but because it also works for the good of science and academia in general,” comments Pensoft’s and ARPHA’s founder and CEO Prof. Lyubomir Penev.

“What we’ve learned from implementing Open Science more and more vigorously in research practices is that striving for transparency and easier collaboration only stimulates scientific progress,” he adds. “One way to do this is definitely by providing the right platforms for giving and addressing feedback.”

Dan Whaley, CEO at Hypothesis, adds:

“We’re excited to see annotation brought to the many publications on the ARPHA platform. As an early member of the Annotating All Knowledge Coalition with a strong commitment to open research and transparent data, Pensoft shares Hypothesis’ commitment to facilitating conversations around scholarly content and improving researcher workflow. We look forward to working with the journal editors to integrate annotation into existing workflows to maximize the success of this initiative.”

Hypothesis is a US 501(c)3 nonprofit organization dedicated to the development and spread of open, standards-based annotation technologies and practices that enable anyone to annotate anywhere, helping humans reason more effectively together through a shared, collaborative discussion layer over all knowledge. Hypothesis is based in San Francisco, CA with a worldwide team. Learn more from <web.hypothes.is>.

Bringing in extensive expertise from his previous appointments with key players in the academic publishing market, alongside experience accumulated through years of independent consultancy, Dr Wahls will be working on expanding ARPHA’s reach towards Western Europe, Greater China, and other Asian countries.

“I’m more than enthusiastic to join the team of ARPHA Publishing Platform and Pensoft Publishers, effective 2018,” says Dr. Matthias Wahls, the Hague, NL. “Bringing this cutting-edge software platform to as many academic publishers will be my key priority. Our focus is to supply an end-to-end solution answering the needs of individual society journals and small to mid-sized publishers alike on their way to entering the Open Science publishing era and switching to the technologically advanced workflows of the future. We equally welcome stand-alone and new journals eager to become ready for the future of Gold Open Access publishing, within the greater context of the EU’s Horizon-2020 program.”

“Making academic research accessible to everyone around the globe has been a key priority for Pensoft from the very start. Having always been exclusively Open Access, in the last couple of years we’ve been aiming to go beyond and supply cutting-edge technologies that tick all boxes on the way to Open Science. With ARPHA we want to provide small publishers and society and institutional journals with a technologically advanced and affordable solution that allows them to enter the era of Open Science, while sitting strong on an increasingly demanding global publishing market.” adds Prof. Lyubomir Penev, Founder and CEO at Pensoft and ARPHA.

Dr Wahls invites editors, publishers, and individual academics who are facing the multiple transition hurdles on their way to adopt Gold Open Access, to take their journals to a next technological level with ARPHA, while staying independent under their own identity.

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What is ARPHA?

Authoring, Reviewing, Publishing, Hosting and Archiving, all in one place for the first time, this is what stands behind the innovative fully integrated journal publishing solution ARPHA, a product of Pensoft.

Fully equipped to cater for a successful transition to a next-generation, technologically-advanced publishing, ARPHA is specifically designed to meet the needs of small and mid-sized publishers and individual society and institutional journals on their journey to entering the era of Open Science, armed with a top-notch publishing technology. Alongside its journal-based module, ARPHA offers solutions for advanced open access book and conference proceedings publishing.

More than just softwareARPHA offers an end-to-end journal publishing platform, in combination with a range of technologically advanced and human-provided services.

Future-proofThis platform offers an option for smooth transition from the conventional, document-based, to the forthcoming, fully XML-based publishing workflow.

White labelARPHA supports both individual and multiple journal platforms under their own logo, customised design and imprint.

High-level integrationARPHA is integrated with leading indexing and archiving platforms via web services.

Semantic publishingARPHA provides generic and domain-specific markup to enhance and facilitate dissemination, machine-readability, harvesting and reuse of published content to improve readers’ experience.

Tailored publishing modelsPublishers or individual journal editors can customise their own preferred workflow across ARPHA’s modules.

Thanks to the new collaboration between content recommendation engine TrendMD and journal publishing platform ARPHA, readers of all journals under Pensoft’s imprint, as well as those using the white-label publishing solution provided by the platform, will be given a useful list of recommended articles related to the study they are reading.

The new widget is to save the users a great amount of time, by simply pointing them to the most relevant papers on the topic from across a constantly expanding network of of peer-reviewed articles and research news.

While nearly 8,000 new scholarly articles are published each day, it is basically impossible staying up-to-date with the news from a single scientific field, let alone doing cross-disciplinary research. Furthermore, sifting out the quality literature is another painstaking activity no academic is looking forward to. Hence, TrendMD comes as the sensible solution to help a reader find the most relevant and fine studies on a particular topic. The widget’s recommendations are based on the topic a user is currently reading, what papers they have read in the past, and the articles others with similar interests have sought out – all available from the most authoritative and quality journals in the world.

“TrendMD is excited to welcome Pensoft, a highly innovative, open access, online publishing platform, to the TrendMD network! This partnership will bring over 5,000 open access articles and books in the field of natural history, predominantly taxonomy and organismal biology, to TrendMD’s ever expanding network,” says Paul Kudlow, CEO and co-founder of TrendMD.

“In our continuing effort to develop and implement the most novel tools and workflows in academic publishing, at Pensoft we are pleased to have integrated our journal publishing platform ARPHA with the new-age scholarly innovation that is TrendMD’s tool, so that our readers have an easy and constant access to the most relevant and best-quality research,” says Pensoft’s CEO and founder Prof. Lyubomir Penev.

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Additional information

About TrendMD:TrendMD is a content recommendation engine for scholarly publishers, which powers personalized recommendations for thousands of sites. TrendMD looks beyond just related links to help people discover, read, and cite interesting scholarly content from journals and websites through personalized recommendations.

With a research output mentioned online every 1.8 seconds, it only makes sense for the science community to grow curious of how they could access the knowledge of this public interest to better and build on their work.

Journal publishing platform ARPHA, developed by academic publisher Pensoft, has partnered with Altmetric to enable authors, readers and other users to track the online shares and discussions relating to each research output in journals published on ARPHA.

Thanks to the integration, a single click in the top menu of an article reveals the Altmetric donut visualisation, which provides an at-a-glance summary of the attention the item has received. The colours of the donut reflect the source of the attention, and the user can click on the image to be taken to the Altmetric details page, which provides a record of all of the mentions. Data is updated in real-time to provide insight into how the item is being received and shared.

As a result, all authors, readers, editors and funders can easily and immediately track the popularity, reception and impact of each of their studies.

“Having built an extensive portfolio of innovations as a technological provider, we are always looking forward to making yet another effort at providing our users with the best-quality experience. The integration of Altmetric data provides us with another opportunity to do exactly this,” says Pensoft’s founder and CEO Prof Lyubomir Penev.

“Furthermore, the science community has long been in need of a more adequate measure of the influence and engagement of individual research outputs, and Altmetric provides this.”

Altmetric’s Founder Euan Adie adds, “We’re excited to see the Altmetric badges being implemented across the ARPHA platform. Helping researchers get credit for their work and demonstrate its reach and influence is a core part of what we do, and this integration provides new opportunities to do so.”

The Altmetric badges and associated details pages are now available for all articles within Pensoft’s journals, as well as the journals using the white-label publishing available from ARPHA.

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Additional information:

About Altmetric:

Altmetric was founded in 2011 and has made it a mission to track and analyze the online activity around scholarly literature. Altmetric tracks what people are saying about research outputs online and works with some of the biggest publishers, funders, and institutions around the world to deliver this data in an accessible and reliable format. Altmetric is supported by Digital Science. Visit http://www.altmetric.com for more information, and follow on Twitter @altmetric.